Interconnect Directionality

The one real difference I can think of is due to shielding. Shields should be connected at the source, not the destination, so I wonder if that's what you are hearing.

Best,
E

From nonoise’s post:

”We underwent a testing program. We wanted to listen to every type of different connector we were going to use, every cable we were going to use and also pay attention to the physical aspects of the support of the all the equipment. All this stuff we had learned had basically come from the high-end hi-fi field, which we’d been trying out over the years and discovered a lot of that stuff made a difference. Some of it was just different; some of it was detrimental but some of it was an improvement. So we went though and we listened to a whole bunch of XLR connectors, we listened to 20 different audio cables, because I needed 23 kilometers of cable to make our own patch bay and rewire everything in the studio... all the outboard gear and the machinery. We listened to 20 different cables. We directionalized them all first, of course. Every cable sounds different in a different direction. It’s small, but it sounds different. And actually, the most amazing thing we discovered was when we listened to our technical earth cables, which we have going into copper rods in the riverbank. Our technical earth cables are just a heavy duty, high quality, regular, copper thick-sheathed cable. We’d been recommended to try this multi strand thinner cable, which had been woven like some of our audio cables.

These are cables for electric?

For earthing, woven to cross individual strands at 90 degrees to each other as much as possible to help eliminate RF etc. We listened to this, and we ran it straight out the door of the boat, over the bridge to the copper rods and we did an A-B and listened. Even the technical earth cable, you could clearly hear the difference from the original earth cable we were using. But even more surprisingly, we said for a laugh, let’s just turn the cable around the other way and see if we can hear any directional difference on the technical earth cable. And we couldn’t believe it, but we could.”

And geoff is vindicated again...

The cause for differences in sound are more due to placement / routing of cables than anything else. This is because the OP’s cables are unbalanced and unshielded, therefore very vulnerable to interference. Bottom line is, if you insist on using unshielded cables, make sure they are twisted pair, and preferably balanced with as high a source signal level as the receiving end will tolerate without overload.